Social Media Metrics 101

by: Randy F. Price

Our clients, potential customers and the brands they represent continue to challenge the notion of social media marketing. I believe this is a good thing, keeps us on our toes. There is an ongoing discussion (similar to the internet and web marketing circa 1999) relative to Social Media Marketing’s (SMM) significance in the marketing mix, ROI and about which department, agency or functional team is best qualified to manage this new hybrid of  market research, CRM, PR/Outreach,word of mouth and advocacy marketing vehicle, channel or platform. . Take your pick of definitions du jour. Oh, and if you didn’t partake of this month’s survey, please do, love to get your take. But I digress. http://social-arc.com/blog/

Here is the logic flow of a presentation recently made to a billion dollar company that asked about the engagement value of social media marketing.

Customer Behavior

The research shows that consumers who research options online are social media participants and by the way that channel yielded the highest number of applicants (lead generation). Customers (current or potential) trust “someone like themselves” to the tune of 68% (vs. 30%, radical change in 2 short years) as reported by Edelman.

Research from London School of Economics and Bain Consulting documented that the brands with the most recommendations online in its category grow 2.5 times the category average. This key research is the fundamental underpinning of the Net Promoter Score systems.Clearly the goal (at least one of the most significant ones) of social media marketing is to inspire and lead positive conversations, engagements and ultimately recommendations.

These “discussions” also impact search results especially if accompanied by a relevant link, and not mention the straight forward approach of providing  compelling call to action, measurement and optimization analysis.

When you look at the share of voice  (actual social media mentions or conversations) split out by competitors, correlated against  social media spending,, it strongly indicates (and validates)  impact.

Spending is not the only criteria, compelling content is also critical. And of course, determining if those conversations achieved the desired result is important and should be defined upfront.

It should go without saying that benchmarking and optimizing should always be a key performance goal and a fundamental objective of any SMM initiative. If you believe, as we do, that this is just the beginning of a new interactive and truly 1-to-1 dialogue with your customers, then establishing real empirical metric targets for success measurement is critical.

To be clear, ultimately sales is the goal. However, building a model that allows for evolutionary precision as well as a variety of key performance indicators  which take into account how the social media tactics you are using are impacting your business objective is always part of the roadmap to success with any innovative approach.

Being a fan of K.D. Paine, I found this podcast interview with her to be spot on and does an excellent job of articulating the symbiotic relationship between objective and key performance metrics.

Forrester’s Take On Sponsored Conversations

Forrester Research is out with a new brief this morning by analysts Sean Corcoran, Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff that says that sponsored conversations on blogs – akin to what how Chris Brogan partnered with KMart – are going to become more commonplace. Further, they recommend the tactic provided that there are clear disclosures all around.

Sponsored posts are nothing new. Although the tactic always raises a fair amount of controversy. Daring Fireball, one of the most popular Mac blogs, regularly runs sponsored posts inside its feed. Techmeme has them on the site too. However, where these are different is that they act more like advertorials. Where it gets prickly is when bloggers themselves write about their personal experience with a product (usually balanced) in exchanged for compensation.

Forrester makes five recommendations in the brief: mandate disclosure, ensure freedom of authenticity, partner with relevant blogs, don’t talk and walk away. All good advice. Further, as you can see from the chart below they sit sponsored conversations somewhere between advertising and PR in the matrix.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

The report misses something, however. This is nothing new. Magazines have run advertorials for years. And radio stations run promotions where the DJ gets involved. What is new is that on many of these sites the editor and publisher are the same individual. There are no hard church/state boundaries as there are with other media.

The way to get around this is to write and submit your own content as a sponsored post. Have the blogger run the copy but with an advertorial label. This has worked in magazines for years.

Further, I would suggest working with an organization that represents bloggers and has experience running such programs – such as Federated Media. In addition, sponsored conversations work best when you integrate tactics across the spectrum that Forrester has here. Sometimes, earning media can lead to additional opportunities to get to know the personalities behind a blog and then additional opps. down the road.

However, on the whole, I agree that we’re going to see more of this in the future. I am hopeful that everyone, publishers and sponsors, will bring their ethical A-game.

Forrester: Agencies Need to be booted (oops, re-booted)

ED NOTE: (oldie but a goldie) …sign of the times when we refer to things approximately 1 year old as oldie. Attention crash is apri pro.

I continually find myself reviewing and looking for a date, is this relevant, what is the context? when and who said it? I still think content is king but without context the value is marginal IMHO.

Anyway, reboot is more like it an I have recently accepted (more like parachuted into) an agency that has gone from being on fire (Nero fiddling kinda of on fire) to “hot” on fire!!… so back to finding the right  mix of acceleration fuel and adult supervision.

P.S. glad to have connected with a Mr. AAron Man; most recently CEO of Relevant Mind (technology platform that translateslistening into influence insight). Not sure he has flown around in a platinum, titanium rocket suit but I still like the IronMANN nickname. Class act and smart. Maybe virginia there is a Santa Claus after all.

Back to re-booting… please keep an eye out for the “new & improved” MarketingWorks Social Marketing Agency, coming to IMAX in a freshly digitally remastered form.

Forrester: Agencies Need to Reboot

Feb 8, 2008

-By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections.

In a new report, the research firm paints a grim view of the current state of advertising, which it believes is in “a world of hurt” because consumers are tuning out the messages the industry is predicated on producing. Instead, it believes shops need to be organized around communities, not disciplines. What it is calling “the connected agency” would not only know certain communities but also be active members of these groups. Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns.

“I can’t say there’s an agency now that’s the agency of the future,” said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report.

The research firm is certainly not the first to assert that agencies haven’t kept up with changing consumer habits and technology. Accenture in November said the shift from analog to digital media is catching shops flat-footed.

In Forrester’s view, a simple fact is driving the need for wrenching change in how advertising agencies are structured: consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. On top of that, consumer media choice has made the notion of a “captive audience,” other than during some sporting events, a thing of the past.

“I don’t think agencies are going away,” Kim said. “They’re going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest.”

He anticipates agencies made up of community members — moms, for instance, helping Procter & Gamble play a constructive role in communities of other mothers.

Since marketers will continue to focus on results from their marketing, particularly as digital media makes it easier to track, advertising agencies would get geekier, Forrester believes.

Despite these changes, Forrester said creative and media agencies are still built around the mass model: to either produce messages or distribute them. Digital agencies have gone farther, in Forrester’s estimation, in centering their businesses around “interaction,” but it finds them lacking in the branding skills of traditional shops.

Clients are finding their agencies wanting. Forrester quotes one marketing exec calling agencies “a necessary evil,” rather than a strategic partner to grow his business. Another complains, “Most senior ad execs appear more comfortable with conventional channels, which they claim are ‘integrated’ because they have tacked on a Web site.”

“The first step [agencies] need to take is with digital integration,” Kim said, adding that the organization of agencies around specific skill sets is the root of their problems.

Stupidity Marketing

STUPIDITY

http://blogs.influencer50.com/newsletter/2009/01/lead-generation-is-the-inevitable-end-goal-of-influencer-marketing/

Marketing Directors will still face an increasingly challenging environment in which to deliver ROI.
Having spent time over the years working with many Marketing Directors, I see two different types. In addition to the smart and the not so smart are the ones running ever faster just to stand still, and those aware that just doing more of the same simply isn’t working anymore.
You would think that with the ability to measure everything when you do online marketing, many companies would do so.
Not so say McKinsey consultants – while 91% of the marketing executives who participated in the McKinsey digital-advertising survey (06/08) reported that their companies were advertising online, 80% said that their companies allocate their media budgets by using subjective judgments or by repeating whatever they did the year before.
Amazingly 50% were using click-through rates to measure effectiveness of their online direct response ads. And only 30% considered the offline impact of online marketing.
Surprisingly (not), those who were measuring the impact of online marketing were more satisfied with digital marketing than those who did not, and 55% of them (compared to 43%) were cutting their spending in traditional media in order to increase their spending online.
It is amazing how many marketing departments are still not accountable for results…sigh…
What tends to differentiate them is their collaborative engagement with the key stakeholders from sales and the other key business functions. The always relevant “acid test” questions:
a) How do we sell more?
b) How do we fill the pipeline with quality leads?
c) How do we improve our conversion ratio?
d) How do we accelerate the sales-cycle?
Articulating everything they do in terms of the impact on the top or bottom line value to the business is the leader’s responsibility.
What the smart Marketing Directors do is ask the Sales VP where their best leads have come from in the past. Typically this is not from advertising, nor from direct mail, or events, but where leads have been referred from those movers and shakers in a particular marketplace. These are the people listened to by prospective customers because they’re respected, trusted and usually pretty independent. These leads enter the pipeline in the first place because the sales or business exec has a relationship with one of these influencers, or is in some way networked to them.
This doesn’t happen by accident. Most Sales VPs and CEOs of successful companies intuitively map out those key players who define their marketplace — the people most influential with their customers and potential prospects. They tap into their networks and existing relationships to source quality leads, create awareness and advocacy amongst the people that most matter — in a word, the Influencers.
But nobody’s network is endless and although this will produce significant initial results it will provide diminishing returns over time. Enter the smart Marketing Director who understands this and realizes that broadening and deepening the relationships with the current customers is the best and most effective ROI of all. That’s Influencer Marketing.

Twittering a New B2B Business Tool

Twittering a New b2b Business Tool
Friday, February 13, 2009
Steve Smith

Don’t be distracted by the top-line data floating around the Web eco-system today about Twitter’s youth-oriented, social butterfly demographic. There is real business already going on here, especially among b2b publishers.

As the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported yesterday, use of micro-blogging personal update services like Twitter rose noticeably in just the last few months. About 11% of online adults now use these services, up from 9% in November. Clearly, Twitter is a youth-driven phenomenon, with penetration rates of up to 20% in the under-35 demo.

Have you Ever Used Micro-Blog Services?*

19% – 18 to 24-year-olds
20% – 25 to 34-year-olds
10% – 35 to 44-year-olds
5% – 45 – 54-year-olds
4% – 55 – 64-year-olds
2% – 65 and older

* Online adults
Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project

Despite the demographics breakdown, in sheer numbers, the median age of a typical Twitter user is 31, substantially older than the median age of MySpace (27) or Facebook (26) and closer to the professional network LinkedIn (40).

In fact, Twitter is fast becoming an interesting back channel for business media editors. Many b2b publications maintain their own branded Twitter feeds, such as InformationWeek, Financial Times and Wooden Horse, and generally they post links to new stories from their sites. While this is a rudimentary use of Twitter as another RSS-like distribution channel, the strategy does play into the habits of micro-blog readers who can subscribe to these updates. According to Pew, Twitter users employ microblogging as a way to learn about and swap pieces of information, usually in the form of shared links. In other words, much more than a casual channel of personal updates (“Whassup?” and “I am eating falafel”), Twitter is evolving into a valuable social media engine. The typical Twitterite (76%) read newspapers online, compared to 60% of the general Internet population, and 14% read newspaper content on their phones, versus 7% of typical onliners.

More interesting to business information publishers is Twitter’s growing importance as a way to connect with one another and an audience of like-minded professionals. PCMag.com’s Lance Ulanoff frequently queries his “followers” about what they would like to see in new technology. Former PCWorld editor-in-chief and Technologizer blogger Harry McCracken blends the personal and professional. IDG veteran Colin Crawford posts questions and news.

Editors are starting to follow BusinessWeek editor-in-chief John Byrne’s lead and use Twitter as a news and tip-gathering source. As Byrne goes into meetings with top business executives he often queries his followers for questions they would like to ask or he solicits his audience for ideas. “It is, without question, driving a lot more interaction with users,” Byrne tells minonline. “Our writers and editors now have more than 40 Twitter accounts, and they are regularly using Twitter for reporting purposes.” His writers covered the inauguration using Twitter posts from the Washington bureau chief. BusinessWeek.com put a twitter feed onto its main site for users to post ideas on how President Obama should direct the stimulus package.

Byrne also uses Twitter as another place to post links to new stories at BWO. “Twitter is showing up as one of our top referral domains,” he says. “It is still quite low in traffic terms, but the user response has been overwhelmingly good.”

Is your brand or company using Twitter in new and interesting ways? Reply to this blog with your take. Thanks!

Learn Social Media in 1 minute and 12 seconds

more about "Learn Social Media in 1 minute and 12…", posted with vodpod

Top 5 Social Media & Marketing ROI Measures

My TOP 5 ROI Measurements – Measuring the Returns of Social Network Marketing

Repost By
by Patrick Courtney

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Online Community Unconference East 2009 at Baruch College here in New York City.  It was my first unconference and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I met a lot of interesting people and participated in some lively discussions about online communities.  One particular session left me with a lot to think about.  It was a discussion on measuring ROI, and the pursuit to define and standardize quantifiable metrics best suited to measure the return of online community investments.

A participant in this discussion made the following comment at the end of the conference when asked what they learned that day, “I learned a lot about ROI.  I learned that no one knows what ROI is for communities so I get to make up whatever i want.”

As humorous as it was at the time, that comment defines an ever-present struggle of proving the worth of enterprise social networks.  An online community is a living, dynamic strategy that can produce many valuable returns on your investment, not all of which will have direct financial impact.  It’s difficult to quantify (simply) the returns on a strategy with so many moving parts.  While a community initiative might end up being a marketing spend, the returns are cross-departmental, which makes measurement difficult when companies are silo-like in structure.

A few key takeaways emerged from our ROI discussion that I wanted to share:

Define the R -  It’s a good idea to define your goals and the appropriate strategy to achieve them before trying to justify the investment.  There are a lot of shiny new social networking tools and resources that are well suited for achieving business objectives but believe it or not, not all of them are going to work for your business.  Are you shooting for short term financial returns or more long term, value based returns?  Do you intend to build your CRM system, lower support costs, raise brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, glean marketing insights, increase sales, generate word of mouth, all of the above? If you dive in without clearly defining your purpose, you run the risk of botching the execution and potentially causing damage to your brand.

Quantify the R - After you know what you want and what you’re going to do, figure out how you’re going to measure it.  Peter Kim wrote a much talked about post back in December boldly stating that ROI is strictly a financial ratio and if social media marketing can’t be measured by ROI, then there’s no place for social media marketing; a sentiment often echoed by C-level executives.  Others believe the traditional metric of ROI is less applicable because of the complex nature of social media and the return is no longer as clear cut as a direct bottom line impact.  Methodologies such as Net Promoter, ASCI, Engagement Loyalty, ROBI ROCI and ROP, among others, are growing in popularity for measuring returns on social network marketing strategies.

Wait for It…- Online communities take time to produce results.  You’re probably not going to see them on Day 1, and you may not see them on Day 31, but if you have the correct measurement methodologies in place you can be confident that sooner or later that needle will start to move; how well you’ve executed your strategy will determine which way.

Value 2.0

What is Value 2.0?

Value 2.0 is Leveraging Social Media To Activate Results

• More measurable & accountable than traditional media
• Granular targeting. Reducing waste, improving effectiveness.
• Empowered consumers demand interactivity and engagement
• Online media because  increasingly it’s where your customer spends most of their time
• Allows marketers to reach prospects throughout the entire consumer buying cycle

How to partner up for social media success

By Cynthia Francis
Thank you Cynthia….

Struggling to launch a large-scale social media campaign without the necessary staff and resources? Here’s how to smoothly enlist a technology provider to meet your goals and make your client happy.
In today’s economy, uncertainty is the only thing that is certain. Companies are closely watching their bottom line, slashing expenditures and headcounts. But even as budgets shrink, marketers can’t afford to lose market share in a competitive marketplace with an increasing number of businesses gunning for a shrinking pool of consumer dollars. Businesses must find compelling ways to reach customers and differentiate from their competitors. So what’s a marketer to do? Spend smarter. Redirect dollars to initiatives with greater ROI potential and embrace the direction consumers are headed online: social media.

Social media is a catch-all phrase that includes all the ways consumers interact with each other in a media-rich online community, including blogs, forums, video/audio/image sharing, UGC and professional content, video remixes and mash-ups, mobile participation communities, and more. Consumers, who are as affected by the economic crisis as businesses, are now buying smarter and they are using social media to research. They are examining products and company reputations, seeking trusted opinions from family and friends, and contributing their own perspectives to the mix, therefore bypassing traditional sources of brand information.
To remain relevant, marketers need to harness the power of social media networks to enhance and extend their existing marketing campaigns. Brand-sponsored or brand-created social media sights create compelling new avenues for brand loyalty and customer interaction. These communities allow the marketer to communicate clearly, regularly, and honestly with consumers, while at the same time improving the brand identity and creating a level of interest and trust.

According to Coremetrics’ Face of the New Marketer Survey, 78 percent of marketing professionals see social media as a way to gain a competitive edge. However, just 7.75 percent of total online marketing spend is devoted to social marketing. ROI for social media is still developing, and while marketers see the value and want to implement these initiatives, budget and resource concerns reign.
As such, the pressure of developing high-touch, cutting-edge social media campaigns falls on agencies, who must deliver on a budget. Campaigns like these require talent and technology to execute, and in the past agencies were able to meet demands by staffing up in-house tech talent when needed. An interactive social media campaign featuring video remixing and editing would often involve the lead to the agency taking the reins for the customer and providing creative oversight and UI development.

However, developing an initiative like this requires an expertise in the software, a design team, and technology providers for specific site elements. In today’s economy, it simply isn’t feasible to hire incremental staff to support such initiatives. So while the relatively new strategy of social media marketing is largely embraced by consumers, it requires staff expertise that is at a premium today. Most agencies are not internally equipped to launch such initiatives without heavy investments in additional personnel and technology infrastructure.

Enter a new business model: a team approach, where agencies and design shops work in tandem with technology providers to get to market faster and more cost-effectively with less business risk for either party. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers offer a unique value proposition to agencies; they own the business risks of developing and maintaining stable software. Agencies are then free to focus on what they do best — building and communicating their client’s brand value — while someone else worries about managing the risk and technical complexity of managing the underlying platform. Successful social media marketing requires an experienced partner with a proven platform. This is a far more efficient and cost-effective approach than trying to build a social media environment from scratch.

To ensure a social media partnership between an agency and technology provider, keep in mind these best practices:

• Co-selling, or at least co-planning, should occur at an early stage in the process.This way, the customer, agency and vendor expectations are effectively set and achieved. To begin with, the agency and social media platform provider should meet and fully demo product capability, creative sensibility, and past work so that both sides are familiar enough to give a good top-level overview. Bringing the technology partner into the first client meeting following the pitch assures that the project is set up appropriately from the beginning.

• Clearly delineate each party’s strengths and limitations.

Tomorrow, Value 2.0

Top 5 2009 Media Predictions NOT, Happen YES, Thank You Yoda

2009 – 5 Trends That Will Change Media

Steve_Rosenbaum over at Always on wrote an amazing insightful post which I simply must share.

While some years I’ll post some thoughts about what may or may not happen in the year ahead, this year – the changes are so clear and the drivers so much in place that I’m going to go out on a limb and say what WILL happen in 2009: trends you can bet on.

1. The Growth of the Curation Economy

As the cost of the creation of content continues to come down, more content creators will come online. This will create a huge influx of unfiltered material, and create a significant demand for filters and editors who can find/sort/select and recommend contextual quality content within verticals. This “Curation” function has the potential to give media enterprises whose current business models are under tremendous pressure a new and important role in the web media world. What makes the Curation Economy so powerful, and so disruptive, is that the core resource required to building a high-quality curated experience is not capital, but knowledge. This will drive an emerging class of content entrepreneurs – people who are able to turn their trusted personal brands into high-quality filtered content destinations. As the number of publishers grows dramatically, content consumers will hunger for new trusted sources. These many creators and consumers on the move will fuel whole new businesses and categories.

2. The Emergence of targeted CPA/ CPC as Contextual Content Revenues

The assumption has always been that as more and more users shifted their media consumption habits from print and TV to the web, big brand advertisers would come along and bring their wallets with them. Well, so far that hasn’t been the case. As Bob Garfield wrote in his prescient “Chaos Scenario” http://adage.com/article?article_id=45561, mainstream cash just hasn’t signed on to this whole ‘new media’ thingy. The result has web sites scrambling to invent new revenue sources, subscription fees, or simply close their doors. But wait – not so fast. Consumers ARE spending money on the web. They’re arriving with intent, finding what they want, and swiping a credit card. This means there IS revenue – just not for big broad unfocused ads. So, watch 2009 as the year that Cost Per Action (CPA) and Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising starts to generate real revenues for content sites. And – don’t count out pre-roll video either. One New York based media co is reporting $40 CPM’s for their pre-roll ads, and they aren’t one of the existing cable channels re-purposing content from linear TV to the web world. This is a real magazine co with original content for the web and a $40 CPM. Stay Tuned!

3. The Merging of eCommerce and Content

It used to be that video content (what was then called ‘Television’) was little more than material used to fill in the space around the ads and attract viewers. Ok, that may sound grim, but it’s true. Content was there to draw ‘eyeballs’ so that large groups of people could be sold stuff. Yikes! That doesn’t sound very nice. Well, a few things have changed. While this Holiday Season was the worse ever for retail, Amazon posted the best sales in their history. Really. So, how did that happen? Well it seems folks who knew what they wanted went to Amazon and searched, and then compared prices, and purchased. This idea of intent driving commerce, rather than advertising creating a ‘demand’ for a particular brand or product, is turning Madison Avenue on its head. But, at the same time – there is some evidence that ecommerce and content are about to switch roles. Sites like Thwoop.com have created children’s destinations with free content, and given themselves a first crack at any purchases that the visitors might want to make. The idea that watching content is expressing ‘intent’ is both novel and explosive. My son likes Ben10, so he watches it on Thwoop.com, and then – well, he asks about buying a Ben10 lunchbox, or shirt, or dvd, or something. Content drives Commerce. Expect to see AmazonTV, EBayTV, LLBeanTV and tons more content channels from ecommerce biggies in 2009.

4. Digital Goods – Consumers begin to pay for content

Digital Goods is a broad concept for anything delivered in code. Music, eBooks, iPhone apps, photos – the list goes on and on. While we’ve seen the idea of ’shareware’ on so many little bits of code for so long, the fact is that 2009 will be the year that Digital Goods will take off. Already the numbers from the iTunes store sales are dramatic – almost a million dollars a day in sale of iPhone Apps. That’s huge. Sure, folks look at the free apps first – but it becomes clear quickly that a few dollars can often get you a much better product. Apple has created a safe, trusted micro-payment economy around iTunes and the fact that only software that is tested gets into their iTunes systems is evidence that the Curation Economy is at play here too. But in 2009 you’ll see more video series, ebooks, photo collections, memberships, and subscriptions gain a foothold. There’s some real world reasons for this – web based digital goods are a better value than their real world counterparts in many cases. And other than the legacy of the physical experience (the paper of The New York Times, the Album Covers of old records, the binding of books) the reality is that digital delivery is better for the planet, and has both the long-tail efficiencies and creative freedom that gives digital creators the ability to lower costs (and therefore price). Middlemen who don’t add value should beware, Digital Goods delivery doesn’t require both a wholesale and a retail seller.

5. Cottage Media Takes Off

Media is a good word. It gets confused with journalism and other more narrow words – but used properly it’s a big tent that includes digital content in all its forms. Historically, Cottage Industries have been small mom and pop operations that run out of someone’s home office. And already we can see the emergence of a number of new voices and sources that are essentially ‘Cottage’ operations. More of the brand name content creators we know and enjoy reading/watching are building their own brands while they remain employed by their big media publishers. In 2009 this will change. While advertising may not be jumping into pure UGC anytime soon, the idea of trusted content brands moving to self-publishing is likely to cause quite a stir. Om Malik was one of the first to make the move – though his operation is clearly much larger than a ‘cottage’ it’s a whole lot smaller than his previous home at Forbes – his network of blogs has already become influential and respected. He’s hardly alone in this regard. Fred Wilson (avc.com) Chris Brogan (http://www.chrisbrogan.com), Michael Arrington (Techcrunch.com) Howard Lindzon (http://www.howardlindzon.com) are all building “Cottage” media businesses, some with a journalism focus, others simply blogging a point of view or to built community or conversation.

2009 will be a year of gut wrenching, dramatic, roller-coast change. Big things will get smaller, or die. Little things will survive and start to grow. Consumers will become creators. Lurkers will become participants. The volume of voices will expand exponentially – and the need for clarity and trusted filters will go from being useful to being essential. Just as MP3s turned the music industry on its ear, and Craigslist turned newspapers upside-down, the emergence of personal publishing and new forms of both trusted and Community Curation will have an immediate and long-lasting impact on media, commerce, community and politics.

2009 will be a year of change. And change is, by its nature, full of surprises. Stay flexible. Stay curious. What’s being constructed is a global knowledge eco-system that has world changing implications… for the better.

Posted by Steve Rosenbaum at Dec 30, 08 08:39 AM